Wons Jared (Jared Vaughn)

Biography

2021: Suspected 14-year-old rape due to DNA data in GEDmatch

At the end of June 2021, police in Tampa (Florida, USA) used GEDmatch and FamilyTree genealogical testing websites to find a 14-year-old rape suspect.

According to police reports, the rape occurred in 2007 when a University of Tampa student returned to her hostel after attending the popular pirate festival Gasparilla. The victim told detectives that she was intoxicated, and the suspect, Jared Vaughn, offered to walk her to the hostel and raped her there.

US police found the rapist through genealogical sites, he poured his DNA into their bases

When the girl turned to the police, detectives collected physical evidence, including DNA samples, but did not find any matches in the police databases, and the case remained unsolved for more than ten years. However, in 2020, detectives revised the case and began searching genealogical testing databases, including GEDmatch and FamilyTree sites. These two services are most often used by people studying their lineage to find potential matches.

Taking into account the new data, the police laboratory considered Jared Vaughn, who turned 44 in 2021, a possible suspect. The cops went to West Virginia, where Vaughn lives, to do another DNA test. The results coincided with samples stored in the police since 2007.

It took 14 years to solve this case, but both for us and for the victim it was important to get to the end, "said Ruben Delgado, assistant chief of police at Tampa.

He also noted that it was for such "dead" cases that a special unit of forensic genealogy was opened in Tampa. Florida was the first US state to have a similar structure in 2018. Similar units have since been set up in California and Utah to handle unsolved violent crime cases.^[1]

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